The present invention generally relates to discovering a physical location of a physical server device. More particularly, the present invention is related to matching a logical property of the physical server device to a physical property of the physical server device.
Datacenters is a facility equipped with computing devices (e.g., HP® MediaSmart Server) and electronic components (e.g., telecommunication and/or storage devices). Datacenters have thousands of server devices. These servers are almost always managed remotely without a physical access for a lot of years (e.g., more than 10 years). As a result, there is usually no known mapping between logical server device names and functions and their physical locations. However, many practical IT optimization tasks such as network topology revisions, power wiring changes, rack server upgrades, cooling optimization, rack relocation, server virtualization and resulting server decommissioning require precise knowledge of the physical server locations, i.e., the physical locations of the server devices. Furthermore, rack server upgrades and decommissioning is usually justified if they are performed for a set of physically co-located servers. A rack server is a computing system including a plurality of server devices. Knowledge of the physical server locations is also necessary during a planning stage of IT optimization tasks.
In traditional datacenter environments, system administrators or teams performing the discovery of physical server locations have to connect every server device to a console (i.e., a physical device for system administrators to enter and display texts) manually to log-in and associate the server device with its logical name and address. Currently, a discovery of physical server locations is performed completely manually. A physical server location refers to a specific position (e.g., an internal (X, Y, Z) coordinate in a datacenter) of the physical server in the datacenter.
Therefore, it is highly desirable for a computing system to automatically perform the discovery of the physical server locations, e.g., in a datacenter, to assist the system administrators and to save cost associated with the discovery.